Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology

Michelle Brown, Eamonn Carrabine, Michelle Brown, Eamonn Carrabine

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138888630
• eBook ISBN: 9781317497530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Dynamically written and richly illustrated, the Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology offers the first foundational primer on visual criminology. Spanning a variety of media and visual modes, this volume assembles established researchers whose work is essential to understanding the role of the visual in criminology and emergent thinkers whose work is taking visual criminology in new directions.

This book is divided into five parts that each highlight a key aspect of visual criminology, exploring the diversity of methods, techniques and theoretical approaches currently shaping the field:

• Part I introduces formative positions in the developments of visual criminology and explores the different disciplines that have contributed to analysing images.

• Part II explores visual representations of crime across film, graphic art, documentary, police photography, press coverage and graffiti and urban aesthetics.

• Part III discusses the relationship of visual criminology to criminal justice institutions like policing, punishment and law.

• Part IV focuses on the distinctive ethical problems posed by the image, reflecting on the historical development, theoretical disputes and methodological issues involved.

• Part V identifies new frameworks and emergent perspectives and reflects upon the distinctive challenges and limits that can be seen in this emerging field.

This book includes a vibrant colour plate section and over a hundred black and white images, breaking down the barriers between original photography and artwork, historic paintings and illustrations and modern comics and films. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to criminologists, sociologists, visual ethnographers, art historians and those engaged with media studies.

1 Introducing visual criminology

Michelle Brown and Eamonn Carrabine

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the visual, prompting important questions over how we should understand the sheer diversity and ubiquity of images in contemporary culture. As disturbing images of crime, trauma and violence become a defining feature of contemporary media culture, there is an increasing need for criminology to engage with the force of visual representation. This handbook provides a sustained focus on how images are reframing the criminological imagination. In a late modern world where reality TV takes viewers into cop cars and carceral spaces, game shows routinely feature shame and suffering, teenagers post ‘happy slapping’ videos on YouTube, both cyber bullying and ‘justice for’ campaigns are mainstays of social media, social movements are launched with viral videos of police violence, and insurrectionist groups compile footage of suicide bomb attacks for circulating on the Internet, it is clear that images of crime and control play a powerful role in shaping social practices.

It is vital that criminologists become versed in the diverse ways that crime and punishment are visually represented in an era of global interconnectedness, especially since the very reach of global media networks is now unparalleled. Of course, it is not simply that there are many more media technologies consumed all over the world, but also that these developments are breaking down conventional understandings of time and space by making events instantly available to us wherever we are, and these representations are more often than not visual in character. The speed of modern communication is not a politically neutral occurrence; the acceleration of perception does not necessarily bring us closer together but instead can reinforce the distance between neighbours and strangers.

Visual criminology gives attention to the relation of representations and images of crime and control to power. It takes as its focal points the structure and operations of visual regimes, their coercive and normalizing effects as well as their contestations. It does so in the context of an unprecedented proliferation of images, sites of production and modes of analysis: ‘as images of crime, harm and punishment proliferate across old and new media, there is a growing recognition that criminology needs to rethink its relations with the ascendant power of spectacle’ (Carrabine, 2012: 463). Visual criminology seeks a more theoretically and methodologically informed understanding of images, one that seeks not simply to supplement existing studies of crime and justice but to expand our lexicon of conceptual tools, approaches and interventions. It privileges the emotive and affective life of the crimino-visual, including the assemblage of imagistic sensory elements that give meanings to crime and control and their relations to spectacle, power, transgression and resistance. Invested in a studied visual sensibility, visual criminology builds upon a working set of analytical approaches that are attuned to the fraught relations between words, images and power, necessary undertakings in understanding the global flow of visual fragments, transgressive montage and their various sensory, material and discursive relations. Thus, the emergence of visual criminology marks a lively arena of original research with seemingly few limits on its application.

The aim of this handbook is to provide the first foundational primer on visual criminology. It is not only intended to offer a state-of-the art guide for those new to this emerging field, but it is also a companion for seasoned researchers – highlighting theoretical currents and central controversies, while also presenting a rich diversity of approaches to gathering, analysing and using visual material. The handbook presents cutting-edge research as well as long established practices. By exemplifying both the best and the latest methods and techniques and identifying emerging trends and new directions, it enlarges our understanding of the role of images and the visual in criminology in diverse ways. Consequently, it spans a variety of media and artistic modes, such as photodocumentary, photoethnography, new media, social media, architecture, data visualizations, design, performance art, advertising, film, conceptual art, mixed media, embodiment, spatialization, surveillance, social documentary, graffiti and urban aesthetics, conceptual models, exhibitions and imaginative interventions to envision crime and punishment otherwise.

While there is a well-established tradition of research on ‘crime and the media’, specific attention to the visual, or indeed on the role and place of the image in crime, in crime control and in criminal justice, has been lacking. Visual criminology is positioned at the cusp of a new era in the study of media, violence and relevance. Such an evolving framework emphasizes the tension that characterizes much of the work of cultural representation in criminology. In the first account, reality is measured against a mediated ‘picture’ that in turn shapes social action and crime policy – there is a discrepancy between ‘reality’ and popular knowledge, what is classically referred to as an old view of representation and that pursues an interrogation of the gap between an image’s ‘true’ meaning and its representation. In the second and newer view of representation, the image is no longer separable from reality. Images of crime constitute, even as they seek to represent, the world through complex intersections of event, meaning, affect, power and ethics. Images of crime and control are produced at the messy intersections of violence, emotion, spectacle, calls for punishment, claims for recognition and consumption patterns caught up within complex media environments, diverse political institutions and vast economies of the image. They accuse and stand accused, raising unresolved moral and ethical tensions. Criminologists have sought to speak back to these complexities through empirical and theoretical research. At these many intersections, images of crime and control overlap with various interrelated calls for a critically engaged criminology of the image (See Carrabine, 2012; Ferrell et al., 2008; Hayward, 2010; Rafter, 2014; Rafter and Brown, 2011; Young, 2005). This is the point at which the term ‘visual criminology’ begins to take meaningful shape.

Work on this theme – particularly on photography, on film and to a lesser extent also on art – has appeared intermittently in specific academic journal articles (some examples include Carrabine, 2011; Rafter, 2007; Valier and Lippens, 2004). The only journal series in the criminological domain that includes work on the visual dimension of crime, crime control and criminal justice regularly is Crime, Media, Culture, which was founded in 2005. While a small number of monographs have been published (Biber, 2007; Rafter and Brown, 2011; Young, 2005), the discipline had to wait until 2010 for a collection of essays to appear on the topic (Hayward and Presdee, 2010). The 2014 special issue of Theoretical Criminology serves as a useful introduction to visual criminology, including work by Nicole Rafter, Eamonn Carrabine, Alison Young, Judah Schept, Steven Wakeman and Michelle Brown.

The time is ripe to build on these interventions and opportunities in order to develop an intellectually informed approach to the visual in criminology, comparable to a visual sociology or visual anthropology, hence the need for this handbook. A visual approach to the study of criminology promises a more theoretically and methodologically informed understanding of images, one that not simply seeks to supplement existing studies of crime and justice but represents a means of investigation in its own right. Even as this visual focus expands the disciplinary tools and insights of criminology, it also broadens the field’s boundaries, incorporating a rich theoretical terrain of interdisciplinary studies. In that pursuit, the following prompts were sent to each author, in order to help frame their contribution:

- What is visual criminology or minimally, what is the relationship of a visual criminology to the contributor’s research?

- What is the significance of the visual to criminology? How does a visual criminology deepen/enlarge our understanding of crime, harm and control?

- How has the kind of criminological research that the author pursues been framed historically, and what is the role of a visual criminology in moving that body of work forward?

- What are the author’s main influences (inspirations) in criminology and beyond? What are the primary theoretical perspectives and methodological orientations that have directed the author towards visual work/work with the image? (Each author should address theory and/or method in some manner.)

- What are the challenges and limits of a visual criminology?

- What is the future of visual criminology?

The following chapters have been arranged in five parts that each highlight a key aspect of visual criminology, and authors were invited to present their work with these prompts in mind. Inevitably then, the handbook does not result in a consistent view nor does it seek to impose one, rather it indicates the diversity of methods, techniques and theoretical approaches currently shaping the field at this stage of its development. Now we turn to situating the visual in criminology more generally, before discussing some of the formative concepts in visual criminology and then describing the contents of the book.

The use of images in a discipline of words and numbers

The visual mode of perception has played a significant role in the social life of all human societies, but the modern world is one saturated with images to an unprecedented degree. Our knowledge of being is shaped by our senses, as the art historian John Berger (1972:7) famously put it: ‘Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak’. Contemporary culture is hyper-visual, and it has been claimed that the body in modern, western society now prioritizes the visual over other senses (Mellor and Shilling, 1997:6). Writing within the social sciences, the implications of this phenomenon were initially identified by Georg Simmel (1908/1921:358) when he claimed that of our five senses, the ‘eye has a uniquely sociological function’. Simmel then describes some of the consequences of dwelling in a seen world, which include how a mutual glance can convey diverse forms of recognition – intimacy, embarrassment, shame, acknowledgement, understanding and so forth; how the intentions and moods of others can be visually read from facial expressions and bodily dispositions; how the role of visual impression increases in large-scale modern cities. These insights have been developed in a range of ways over the last century, but his crucial point about the profound significance of the visual in social life lies at the core of this handbook.

However, difficulties immediately arise because criminology is so dominated by ‘words and numbers’ that simply introducing images into scholarship is ‘likely to retard the development of a visual criminology, since it will leave in place the ugly notion that written or numeric analysis can somehow penetrate the obfuscation, conquer the opaqueness, of the image’ (Ferrell et al., 2008:186, emphasis in original). It is notable that one of the pioneers of visual methods, the anthropologist Margaret Mead (1974/2003:5), has discussed how her own discipline ‘became a science of words, and those who relied on words have been very unwilling to let their pupils use the new tools’ of photography and film. Among the social sciences, it is anthropology that has used images in the greatest variety of ways, but their colleagues loudly complained that their pictures ‘were no different from the ones tourists made of exotic places’ and ‘served no better purpose than those amateur works’ (Becker, 2004:194). There are now many histories of how visual methods have taken shape, and many of our contributors discuss these different genealogies, but it is clear that distinct visual strategies have developed in specific disciplinary contexts. Visual criminology invites the development of alternative objectives and methodologies but with an astute understanding of its place within criminology and within broader historical visual knowledges, such as art history, visual culture, cultural studies, media studies and critical theory. Criminology’s relationship to the image is less internally driven and grounded instead in the approaches of visual culture and cultural studies as well as the visual methods of social research.

The standard use of photography remains largely illustrative, a descriptive resource, ‘intended only to vivify the serious work of ethnographic analysis accomplished by the written text’ for it would seem that ‘anthropologists have not commonly entertained the possibility of doing serious analysis of their photographs’ (Ball and Smith, 1992:13). Although this situation has begun to change, with work appearing that does explore the complex relationships between anthropology and photography (Pinney, 2011), the material itself is often under analysed and opens up the exciting possibility of more nuanced analyses of visual representation. Indeed, it has frequently been noted ‘that what we remember of our dreams consists largely of visual images’ (Chaplin, 1994:197), which further highlights the deep-seated ties between visualization and the organization of human existence.

From its invention in 1839, the status of photography as a medium drew from both its ability to authentically record the truth and to present a radically new way of seeing the world, prompting much debate over the seductive relationships between photography, fantasy and reality. As one of us has argued:

Ever since the birth of the camera it has been accused of upsetting the divide between public worlds and private selves, transforming the very act of looking and giving rise to a whole series of characterizations of this condition: the society of spectacle, the politics of representation, the gendered gaze, and so forth, are amongst the more well known. Indeed, photography was a vital element in the construction of the modern criminal subject and…the dynamics of celebrity, criminality, desire, fame, trauma and voyeurism continue to shape social practices in significant and often disruptive ways. Alongside identifying criminals, photographs are used to establish evidence, construct crime scenes and as techniques of state surveillance.

(Carrabine, 2014:134–35)

In an influential essay, Allan Sekula (1981) challenged approaches to photography that ignored the social and political functions of images, and exposed their ideological interplay in wider systems of classification, control and order. Similar themes are also explored in John Tagg’s (1988) The Burden of Representation, in which he discusses the rise of photographic portraiture, the development of photography as a form of ‘evidence’, in legal, medical and police practices, as well as a vehicle of social reform. Importantly, he argues against any single history of the medium, preferring instead to see photography ‘flickering across a field of institutional spaces’ (Tagg, 1988:118).

Photography was not only used in the management of problem populations (criminals, orphans, the mad and so on) but was also becoming an integral way of honoring the lives of famous celebrities and an expanding middle class (Hamilton and Hargreaves, 2001). Both Tagg and Sekula present forceful Foucauldian understandings of the institutional power at work in police and prison photography. However, they have been criticized for not considering a broader range of photographic practices and for ignoring the gendered dynamics at work in the collection, exchange and display of photographs in domestic settings (Di Bello, 2007; Smith, 1998). As Gillian Rose (2012:234) suggests, these nineteenth-century female photographers were creating images that did not ‘replicate the surveillant gaze of the police mug shot or the family studio portrait’, and in doing so, they ‘thwart the classifying gaze by strategies such as blurred focus, collage and over-exposure’. This more recent historical research presents the possibility of a richer understanding of the uses of photography and the practices that accompany it. Although charting the path from Victorian mug shot to contemporary surveillance society will not be attempted in this opening chapter, it is clear that today there are a plethora of new tools (including biometrics, DNA analysis, digital imagery and computer databases) providing new ways of representing, and watching, criminals and suspects, as our contributors make clear.

Formative concepts in visual criminology

Given that visual images, artifacts and circulatory processes often exceed the analytical language of formal criminology in their relationships and explanations of crime and control, conceptual work that extends the projects of both visual and conventional criminology is necessary. Visual criminology by definition, in the manner in which it asks us to see the production of crime and control differently, extends the boundaries of critical practice, making room for the production of new concepts and knowledge. In doing so, it relies upon new and interdisciplinary keywords like image, iconography, visuality, countervisuality, scopic regimes, optics and ocular logics to make sense of new mediascapes and the continuing relevance of gender, race, sexuality, class, etc. in criminology.

Visuality (Mirzoeff, 2011) captures the manner in which vision is essential to empire and the state. It is a term that names the authoritative mobilization of specific forms of seeing and ordering the world, practices which p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of plates
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing visual criminology
• Part I Foundations – history, theory, methods
• Part II Images and crime
• Part III Images and criminal justice
• Part IV Accusing images and images accused
• Part V Future directions
• Index